The role of morpho-phonological regularity and similarity in processing italian verbs

Abstract

The aim of this experimental study is to investigate the representation and processing of regular, sub-regular and irregular verbal forms of Italian. In psycholinguistics, the debate on the processing of regular and irregular verbs is based on the contrast between Dual Mechanism models (Pinker and Prince, 1988; Clahsen, 1999; Caramazza, Laudanna and Romani, 1988), which claim that regular forms are processed through the application of inflectional rules, while irregular forms are retrieved as whole words from the associative memory, and Connectionist models (McClelland and Patterson, 2002; Joanisse and Seidenberg, 1999; Rumelhart and McClelland, 1986), which claim that a single associative mechanism accounts for both regular and irregular form processing. Despite Dual Mechanism models clearly support distinct mechanisms for the representation of regular and irregular verbs, several studies point out that this dichotomy is challenged by the existence of families of "sub-regular" verbs, which share morpho-phonological features and follow the same inflectional patterns. The debate on sub-regular patterns evolved especially with respect to languages like Italian, based on the organization into inflectional classes, each characterized by a specific regular paradigm, and on a varying aggregation of sub-regular families. The coexistence of multiple regular patterns and sub-regular families seems to be consistent with the Optimality Theory (Prince and Smolensky, 1993; Benua, 1997, Bernhardt and Stemberger, 1998; Smolensky, 1999), which departs from the traditional concept of inflectional rule and invokes the use of phonological constraints, based on phonological analogies between surface forms of words and on different degrees of relevance and "violability". [edited by author]